Category: Sides

Sometimes at the weekend I like to make something a little bit more special for breakfast than the usual toast, porridge or cereal that I would usually have during the week. There’s something really nice about having the luxury of time on a Sunday morning to make a batch of syrup-drenched fluffy pancakes or a stack of french toast and take it back to bed with a hot cup of tea or coffee.

These savoury breakfast muffins were invented one Sunday morning when I saw that I had a courgette and some grated cheese that needed to be used up soon. I added a couple of rashers of smoked bacon to the mix and a really tasty breakfast muffin was born. (You could leave the bacon rashers out if you’d prefer a vegetarian muffin.)

These savoury breakfast muffins are really easy to make, requiring little more than chucking all of the ingredients into a bowl, mixing, pouring into muffin cases and baking, but they’re incredibly rewarding to eat. They are soft, moist gluten-free muffins that are studded with chunks of fresh courgette, melted cheddar cheese and salty, smoky bacon cubes. They’re just what you need to go with the Sunday papers in bed.

Savoury Breakfast Muffins by The Fat Foodie

Ingredients:

3 eggs

50ml vegetable oil

250ml rice milk

220g gluten-free flour (I use Dove’s Farm G/F flour because it’s made with low FODMAP ingredients whereas many other gluten-free flours are made with high FODMAP options.)

My Mum makes a cracking dinner in which she coats chicken breasts in beaten egg and then dips them in Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix and bakes them in the oven. They’re absolutely delicious, but as anyone who follows the low FODMAP diet will tell you, onion can be a massive trigger for a lot of people, me included, so I needed to adapt Mum’s recipe to make a FODMAP friendly version.

The dried sage is perfectly FODMAP friendly and the breadcrumb component of the sage and ‘onion’ chicken was easy enough to substitute with some stale low FODMAP gluten-free bread, but the ‘onion’ flavour that’s so characteristic of stuffing mix can be difficult to replicate. However, I’ve written before about the fantastic spice that is asafoetida powder, a powerful spice that’s derived from a variety of giant fennel and is wonderful for using in recipes as an onion substitute. Its flavour truly mimics the depth of onion and it even has a hint of garlic notes to it too, so it’s the ideal low FODMAP solution to add to your recipes.

I’d been looking for something to serve alongside the sage and ‘onion’ chicken and although I love chips and homemade potato wedges, I fancied something a bit more exciting to go with it, so when I noticed the pack of ready made polenta in the cupboard I decided to have a go at making my own polenta chips.

I’ve tried making my own polenta from scratch before and I’ve never been that impressed with it, but I absolutely adore Jamie Oliver’s polenta chips that he serves in his Italian restaurants, so when I was shopping a while ago I thought I’d buy a pack of ready made polenta and try to have a bash at making polenta chips at home.

I’ll be honest with you, although these polenta chips are very tasty, it was difficult to get the same results as those you can have at a Jamie Oliver’s Italian because I think you’d need to deep-fry the polenta chips to get the same level of crispiness that his have. Also, I’d think I’d prefer to have a chip that’s made from potato instead of polenta because at least that way I’d be eating the abundance of vitamins and nutrients which are naturally found in potatoes rather than the pretty much pure carbohydrate that is polenta.

I really enjoyed this dinner of sage and ‘onion’ chicken with polenta chips. The crispy, but tender and juicy, baked sage and ‘onion’ chicken tasted just as good as the Paxo coated version my Mum makes, with the asafoetida powder providing the right oniony flavour it requires, and the parmesan coated polenta chips were a tasty accompaniment to go with it. All it needed was a good dollop of Heinz ketchup on the side. I’m classy like that…